Not all space sail concepts use solar photons as their driving force. One possibility: Harvesting naturally occurring antimatter around the outer planets, as investigated by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts, or the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth, which have much less abundant antimatter, but are a lot closer. 30 milligrams of antimatter would enable missions to the outer planets with round trip times on the order of 2-3 years, but an Alpha Centauri mission will still require tens of grams. The push is essentially a nuclear-stimulated ablation, one that can produce specific power on the order of 2000 kilowatts per kilogram. The antimatter reacts with the uranium to produce neutrons and various secondary emissions, fission fragments that leave the sail at enormous speeds. One possibility, analyzed by physicist Steve Howe (Hbar Technologies, LLC) is to store anti-hydrogen aboard the spacecraft and let it be released so that it interacts with a small (five-meter) sail impregnated with U-238.
Given how expensive it is to create antimatter, we have to work with vanishingly small amounts. The tactic of Tau Zero is to determine the weakest link in each of these concepts as the way to identify the next-step priorities for each. Regardless of not being able to predict which idea is best, the further pursuit of each idea will likely produce valuable insights. The main point is that there is no definitive ‘best’ idea at this time. Some methods will be better for some missions than for others. The relative merit of each of these ideas will also vary depending on the chosen mission and vehicle requirements. Because of the complexity and incomplete work behind these concepts, it is difficult to determine how viable each method might be. perfect heat rejection or superconductors with no current limit).
However, when digging into the details, sometimes there is some critically required material that cannot exist (unobtanium or its derivative unobtanium-dioxide) or some component whose operation does indeed violate physics (e.g.
All of the ideas in this category are possible, in principle.
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